When I returned to college as an undergraduate student over the age of forty, it was a wake-up call on several levels. Life lessons can appear in a variety of ways, and for me, one particular lesson accompanied an assignment to give a speech on an influential person in history that somehow affected my personal views or motivation for success. I chose Harriet Tubman. After presenting the speech to my 18 to 20-year-old classmates, I was particularly struck by two comments. One student told me that she really appreciated my speech because she had never heard of Harriet Tubman before. The other student asked me where the Underground Railroad was located because he was interested in visiting it. This is when I realized that our country is facing a crisis in historical education.
We all have done things in our past that we regret. However, it is often that regret that pushes us forward into a more streamlined, positive direction. Without the detour provided by the mistake that was made, we would have missed the smoother path altogether. American history is stockpiled with mistakes. However, some are making huge efforts to sweep these mistakes under the proverbial rug.
Representatives in some states are making relentless efforts to water-down history that does not reflect the majority’s present day morals. In doing so, we must ask ourselves what the possible consequences could be of diluting, removing, or backgrounding negative aspects of American History within educational texts. The problem, of course, within the efforts to hide history is two-fold. History tends to have a cyclical effect when strong efforts are not made to prevent past mistakes from reoccurring. If texts are changed due to present day moral structures, it would not be a stretch to assume that actual morality could shift in the future because students will not have been taught the catastrophic effects of the country’s historical mistakes. This, of course, would also cause more detriment to the reverence of historical education.
The exit of socially motivated change in history seems to be one of the pivotal factors within the argument. In Jefferson County Colorado, board member Julie Williams stated, "Materials should promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights. Materials should not encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law." The key problem with William’s projected purpose of educational materials is that history does not often reflect the same values that she would like it to reflect. After all, we had to make a lot of mistakes to get us to where we are today. That is the point.
Re-envisioning history seems to be running rampant within political agendas. In March of 2015, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution printed a story about advanced placement history courses being under heightened criticism for presenting a “radically revisionist view.” The resolution came with the denouncement of the new advanced placement U.S. History curriculum, which Georgia State Sen. William Ligon refers to as “a radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.” The statement “negative aspects” begs the question of how much positivity whitewashing the past can dictate, and whether it outweighs erasing the cost of one human life, or liberty gained or lost in history. Certain aspects of the Civil Rights Movement were left in the curriculum, such as the Black Panthers, while other integral events, such as Rosa Parks and the bus boycotts, were left out. So, once again, we are left to wonder whose perspective determines which historical events are chosen to be preserved.
The battle lines between the political parties seem to be clearly drawn; however, editing the books to accommodate each party’s views seems to consist of nothing more than a doodle. No clear answer is given as to what exactly should be edited, what should not be edited, and what the consequence of those edits might be. In fact, no answer was given regarding the cost future generations who are shielded from the truth about our nation’s history will have to pay, and I believe that is a consequence that needs to be clearly defined.
One obvious consequence of editing textbooks with the goal of smoothing racial tension is that it will, instead, exacerbate the racial divide and create a larger chasm. Acclaimed writer Toni Morrison in her essay “Playing in the Dark” talks about racial frustration directly. She states, “It is further complicated by the fact that the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference. To enforce its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body. According to this logic, every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse.” This “shadowless participation” that Morrison refers to creates a haunting image. The mind conjures up the faceless images of the suffering of millions to slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, and citizen-spawned lynchings. If we wipe the faces clean of the emotional and physical suffering people have endured, we are, in effect, re-illustrating history as a picture to our own liking. This creates a fictional play for younger generations, not history.
Another consequence of removing historical events from textbooks is a generational division. If one generation is taught about Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Medgar Evers, Joseph McCarthy, the Holocaust, and the like, but the next generation is not, the disparity between generations can become vast. Throughout the ages, older generations have shared with younger generations, through oratory customs and storytelling, the historical events and wisdom collected through time. However, the revamping of historical data to try to technicolor history with sepia tones will sever this timeless tradition. If efforts to repaint history within historical texts are implemented, generations will be taught contrasting historical takes on the same historical events, and no one will know what to believe. Nevertheless, it is happening. The wide sweeping arm that longs to brush our nation’s history under the rug is building its own history within many states.
Covering up our nation’s blemishes definitely seems to be of a refined focus in the past five years in the state of Texas. In 2010, according to the article “Texas board approves social studies standards that perceived liberal bias” written by Michael Bimbaum, the decision was made to change state textbooks to reflect that the McCarthy era of the 1950s was later vindicated, and for the books to propose that “the United Nations imperil American sovereignty.” But what about the sovereignty of education? The peril of the state of education must be measured and well identified before steps are taken to eradicate the unclean.
A shift in classroom rhetoric is a dangerous one to make because the effects will reverberate for generations to come. The calculated examination of what element of educational context is pulled out of the classroom must be thoroughly considered so that the consequence of a new classroom rhetoric doesn’t weigh heavier on future generations than the presentation of the controversy would. Though it is too early to have solid indicators on the results of censoring history within classrooms, we can identify other shockwaves on classroom rhetoric through the efforts of protecting the younger generations of students. In “Yale’s Unsafe Spaces,” Meghan O’Rourke explores the shift in the rhetoric of higher learning classrooms and the need for safety and entitlement that has shrouded student bodies in recent years. In Laura Kipnis’s essay “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe,” published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in reference to the now controversial subject of professors dating students, she makes a statement that forces us as citizens to analyze the broader subject of students’ increased sensitivities: “If this is feminism, it’s feminism hijacked by melodrama. The melodramatic imagination’s obsession with helpless victims and powerful predators is what’s shaping the conversation of the moment, to the detriment of those whose interests are supposedly being protected, namely students. The result? Students’ sense of vulnerability is skyrocketing.” Protecting the feelings of future generations of students may actually be their greatest punishment.
If history is, in fact, cyclical and mistakes are repeated throughout history (as history itself suggests), the forcible change that comes with establishing new expectations of the presentation of information in the classroom will take its toll in one fashion or another. Either law classrooms are not able to teach rape law anymore due to protecting the sensitivity of students, which will leave rape victims lacking representation, or the definition of slavery is redefined indefinitely by exempting key figures that fought to dismantle it out of texts. In order to be sensitive to an issue, elimination of that issue may be construed as censorship, but rewording that issue may have even harsher connotations, such as lying. In October of 2015, McGraw-Hill was called to task when a Texas parent put a picture of her son’s World Geography textbook, which referred to slaves as “workers,” on social media. The term workers implies that these people were paid. That may be the case for many parents who drop their kids off at school every day—they go to “work” and get paid. So, the only frame of reference these students have is that these “workers” were much like their parents, which changes the entire context of the historical events that took place, creating aftershocks throughout history that are still felt today.
Words count. They just do.